Infantry tactics at the time
of the Civil War were based on the use of the smoothbore musket, a weapon of limited range
and accuracy. Firing lines that were much more than a hundred yards apart could not
inflict very much damage on each other, and so troops which were to make an attack would
be massed together, elbow to elbow, and would make a run for it; if there were enough of
them, and they ran fast enough, the defensive line could not hurt them seriously, and when
they got to close quarters the advantage of numbers and the use of the bayonet would
settle things. But the Civil War musket was rifled, which made an enormous difference. It
was still a muzzle-loader, but it had much more accuracy and a far longer range than the
old smoothbore, and it completely changed the conditions under which soldiers fought. An
advancing line could be brought under killing fire at a distance of half a mile, now, and
the massed charge of Napoleonic tradition was miserably out of date. When a defensive line
occupied field entrenchments-which the soldiers learned to dig fairly early in the game-a
direct frontal assault became almost impossible. The hideous casualty lists of Civil War
battles owed much of their size to the fact that soldiers were fighting with rifles but
were using tactics suited to smoothbores. It took the generals a long time to learn that a
new approach was needed.
Much the same development was
taking place in the artillery, although the full effect was not yet evident. The Civil War
cannon, almost without exception, was a muzzle-loader, but the rifled gun was coming into
service. It could reach fartherand hit harder than the
smoothbore, and for counterbattery fire it was highly effective-a rifled battery could hit
a battery of smoothbores without being hit in return, and the new 3-inch iron rifles,
firing a 10-pound conical shot, had a flat trajectory and immense Penetrating power. But
the old smoothbore-a brass gun of 4.62-inch caliber, firing a 12-pound spherical
shot-remained popular to the end of the war; in the wooded, hilly country where so many
Civil War battles were fought, its range of slightly less than a mile was about all that
was needed, and for close-range work against infantry the smoothbore was better than the
rifle. For such work the artillerist fired canisters tin can full of iron balls, with a
propellant at one end and a wooden disk at the other-and the can disintegrated when the
gun was fired, letting the iron balls be sprayed all over the landscape. In effect, the
cannon became a huge sawed-off shotgun, and at ranges of 250 yards or less it was in the
highest degree murderous.
This portion of the "Home of the American
Civil War" website attempts to explain a little about the various weapons used in the
Civil War and while you will find few images here, you will find a lot of good material on
"the weapons of war".